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- [00:00]
Peter V. Bond
Retail media is rapidly becoming the go to channel for brands, aiming to engage consumers with measurable performance along the path to purchase. Retailers are increasingly empowering brands to accurately target meaningful audiences based on their longitudinal purchasing behaviors and execute media impressions across on site, off site and in store channels throughout the entire marketing funnel. For brand marketers, effectively incorporating retail media into their marketing budgets is essential for growth in today's omnichannel landscape. To address this critical need, Cornell University has partnered with the CPG Guys, along with leading industry executives and visionaries from around the world to launch the first ever retail Media Strategy Executive Education program. This immersive four day program at Cornell Tech May 5th to the 8th, 2025 brings together industry thought leaders and renowned faculty to share best practices for building compelling retail media platforms. You'll discover how to collaborate on creating best in class tech stacks, measure performance to ensure brands Access the necessary KPIs based on Campaign objectives and establish strong partnerships between brands and retailers. In addition, the program covers optimizing brand strategies using AI driven campaign design at scale to achieve marketing goals. By the end of the Retail Media Strategy program, you'll have gained a deep understanding of the retail media ecosystem and how both brands and retailers can accelerate organizational transformation to thrive in the future of performance marketing. See the link in the digital liner note to this episode to learn more about the Retail Media Strategy Executive Education Program at Cornell Tech May 5th through the 8th, 2025 hi, I'm Simone Lumsden.
- [01:42]
Simone Lumsden
From Canadian Tire and you're listening to the CPG Guys.
- [01:48]
Peter V. Bond
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Your host, Sree Rajagopalan and VS Bond explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. I'm PVSB Co host and co Founder. I also serve as Head of Industry and Client Engagement at Flywheel, the E Commerce accelerator division of Omnicom. Joining me as always in the hosting duties for today's episode is my co founder of this growing media platform. He's the Chief Revenue Officer at Think Blue Consulting and he is also, most importantly, patriarch of the Raj family media empire which includes his performing artist daughters Ria and Lara and his wife Kavita, who co hosts her own podcast, Lights Camera Conversation. Most recently he served as the Chief Customer Officer and President of Sales at General Mills. He's the man known as Sri Sri. I don't know about you if you caught last night's NHL Four nations face off. The Americans were up against the Canadians. And in overtime, the Canadians won the cup. Big day in the Bond household and all of my fellow Canadian citizens at home and abroad. What a big day. What did you think?
- [03:14]
Sree Rajagopalan
You know that I know nothing about hockey other than I have a Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap. That because my brother is such a big fan living in Toronto up there. And I also have a signed puck from. Wait, wait a minute. Wayne Gretzky, something like that. Was. Was he known.
- [03:32]
Peter V. Bond
Oh, don't make it. Don't you know exactly who he is? Now you're. Now you're just. Now you're just poking me. Sree, don't do that.
- [03:38]
Sree Rajagopalan
Is he better than Jalen Hurts Sri.
- [03:41]
Peter V. Bond
There's. It's quintessential Canadian. You know my favorite references don't go where the puck is. Go where the puck is going. And that came from the great one.
- [03:50]
Sree Rajagopalan
How many touchdown he had.
- [03:51]
Peter V. Bond
Okay, Sree, we're going to move on anyway.
- [03:54]
Sree Rajagopalan
Hey, wait a minute, Peter, before. I want to recognize for a moment, though, that we're in March 2025, and I'm very excited for this episode because it's part of Women's month on the CPG guys. And here in March 2025, we only have female leaders from across corporate America, North America, Canada, because we're celebrating the amazing people leaders are. Women leaders are in this country and in Canada. So I'll wait for you to name our guest. But I'm very thankful that this guest chose to come and spend time as well as educate North America and all the wonderful things this guest is doing for her brands.
- [04:32]
Peter V. Bond
Yeah, Shree, this. I couldn't agree with you more. We started Women's Month five years ago, and it's great that we recognize that not just in this month, we do so continuously. And frankly, if you look historically, over half of our guests have been women. But it is important, in keeping with International Women's Month, that we try and advance inclusivity and diversity in how we run this podcast. Despite what might be happening in the world around us, it's still part of our DNA. But before we introduce our guests, I just want to make sure that our audience is subscribing to our podcast on your favorite platform. If you're on Apple and Spotify particularly, click the follow button at the top and also scroll a bit down and go to the ratings and review section. Give us a star rating. Our favorite number is five, but it's kind of up to you if you do. It helps make our podcast more findable through the algorithms. And people like you in the industry who like to be educated and entertained can find us as well. So please, please do that. And while you're there, don't forget, follow our sister podcast, the FMCG Guys and CPG Scoop on your favorite platform. Add them to your rotation. So let's get to our special guest. Today, we're continuing our exploration of the CPT retail industry north of the border by welcoming someone from an iconic retailer to our podcast. Anyone who's from Canada is very familiar with Canadian Tire. It is the original Canadian mass merchant. My brother Jim Johnston spent nearly two decades there, which is why it holds a special place of high regard in my family. Founded in Toronto by the brothers JW and AJ Bells, the company got its start when the brothers bought the Hamilton Tire and garage in 1922. In 27, they incorporated the business as Canadian Tire Corp. Corporation. Its iconic Canadian Tire money loyalty program was launched in 1958. I always remember having Canadian Tire bucks in my wallet as a little kid. Here to tell us about how Canadian Tire is engaging its shoppers in today's digitally driven world is the Senior Vice President of Triangle Loyalty. If you know the logo of Canadian Tire, you understand the homage to that and the word triangle. She leads both Triangle Loyalty and Triangle Retail Media. Please join SRI and me in welcoming to the podcast Simone Lumsden. Greetings, Simone. How you doing?
- [07:16]
Simone Lumsden
I'm doing great, and thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be here, Peter and Sree, and certainly very apropos. I'm a little hungover from last night's celebration because I am very Canadian, so I'm not actually hungover, but I'm intellectually hungover because it was just so fantastic, like tears in the eyes. It was amazing. So it was an amazing. Just an amazing time for us. It's overall geopolitical climate is a little bit fascinating for we Canadians at this point in time. So we took a little break from that and we had a lovely hockey game. So it was fantastic.
- [07:52]
Peter V. Bond
You know, I always ask this of Canadians. If you had the choice between winning 20 gold medals, none of which were hockey, but to win the men's and women's gold medals in hockey, which would you choose? 20 or 2?
- [08:06]
Simone Lumsden
Oh, you know what? We are getting very passionate about our other sports. I mean, soccer, for example. So I think. I mean, we love hockey, it is our sport, but we are really making a lot of progress in some of the other areas. So I think we'd go for the 20. I really think we would.
- [08:22]
Peter V. Bond
Okay, okay. That's a, you know, I'm, I'm like, I want my hockey, I want my hockey gold. I, I just want my gold.
- [08:29]
Simone Lumsden
And to the point that you raised about Women's Month. So women's sport is really moving in strides, as we know, on a worldwide basis and in particular in Canada and at Canadian Tire, we strong, strong supporters of women in sport. So you do need to get more medals. So we would still, as I say on that basis, go for the 20.
- [08:50]
Peter V. Bond
There you go. There you go. Well, thank you for sharing that. For our listeners interested in learning more about Simone and Canadian Tire as we go on with our conversation, we have links to her LinkedIn profile, Canadian Tire's LinkedIn page, and their corporate site in the digital liner notes this episode so you can follow along as we, we continue with this conversation. So let's get to the questions. You know, your Simone, your career spans some classic consumer goods. You went into cable television and mobile with a focus on digital customer experience. I'm curious about what about the, this, this chosen field most excited you as, and what were some pivotal experiences that you think really prepared you for your current role at Canadian Tire?
- [09:41]
Simone Lumsden
What I've done for most of my career is focused on leveraging data and analytics to deliver customer experiences. So in the telco world, and part of the reason I ended up going from cpg, because back in those days, you had a Nielsen report and that's all you had. So went from that to telecommunications, where I had a customer base of millions of customers and I had deep insight and data. And we were building predictive models way back when because Churn was always so critical in that business. And we went from basic Churn models to predictive models all across the business to grow the business. So understanding how you can leverage data, harnessing that and getting great data integrity and really deep understanding of your customer is what I did for my entire career at telecommunications. And then also really caring about the customer experience, what the journeys were. So customer journeys again, something that telco we've been working on for years and years and years. Retail came to the party a little later because they needed that first party data that they all acquired through loyalty programs in order to deliver what they deliver today. But without the loyalty programs, they didn't have that data and insight. So for me, this transition from that richness of data in a certain vertical to retail, where you get the richness of data but so much broader because we know so much more than you ever knew in telecommunications has been what set me up so that orientation about how to use data, but that desire to have more contextual information and a broader data set that could inform decision making. So it's been really quite fantastic. This is the best. And we'll talk about this today. It's why I'm here. I am working with the best data set I have ever had exposure, exposure to and I believe actually it's one of the best in this country because of the breadth and depth of the categories we cover. You touched on it briefly, but because it's going to be germane to what we're going to talk about just for our listeners and those who are in the US in particular, who may not be familiar. We are a big box retailer and we sell all sorts of different categories from kitchenwares, household goods, seasonal offerings, pets, toys, party wares. We have Party City and then we actually have a bank as well. We also sell gas. We also do full auto parts, but also auto service. So we really cover an incredibly broad range of categories, which is not what you might think. So like Canadian Tire covers. But then importantly, like many retailers, we have multiple banners. So Canadian Tire is just the primary banner. But then we have an equivalent of what we would have, Dick's Sporting Goods, so it's called Sport Check. So think of Dick's and what they do, hard and soft goods, athletic. And then we also have Marks, which initially was a works warehouse, so work attire, but now has gone into the casual attire area. And then we have other outdoor atmosphere. We have other banners as well, but those are really the main ones. So contextually that is kind of the input and the fuel to what we're going to talk about today, which is our retail media product.
- [12:52]
Sree Rajagopalan
I want to say thank you. And Simone, I also want to personally welcome you to the cpg Guys, thank you for joining us during Women's Month. So let's jump right into retail media. As you just said, both retail media and loyalty are obviously very developed, I would say even to some point over developed. But Europe seems to be the one that's overdeveloped at this point because they've even incorporated in store very well, which we haven't done in the US as far as our knowledge goes. What is the state of data driven closed loop marketing in Canada? Is retail media where it needs to be? And then what are the primary objectives of your program, which is triangle.
- [13:34]
Simone Lumsden
Great questions. So no, the Canadian industry is really, I would call quite nascent. So in the US it's quite evolved to the point that all the major CPG players For example, they are working directly with retail media players because they understand that business, they understand what it brings to them, the richness of the data, and they do it either with or without their actual agencies facilitating that. There's a lot of direct connections happening between the brands, the companies and the retail media players themselves. In Canada, that's not really the case. You don't have these big CG CPG players and other vendor partners who are seeking out retail media just yet. We're tending to have to work most importantly with our biggest vendor partners who are endemic to our business, and then separately going and partnering with agencies who are then in turn selling it in to their clients. So it's a little bit of a different stage in terms of maturity because the awareness is not quite there yet. The second part of what you asked about is about measurement and I cannot emphasize enough how critical we all know that measurement is. If you can't measure at a granular level, closed loop at a SKU level for your vendor partners, then you're going to be nowhere fast. But the measurement piece is fairly tricky, so it hasn't been totally well oiled yet. It is something that we focus on all the time. We're using something we call a synthetic control to get incremental roas and we do do the closed loop on a skew basis, but it's extremely manual right now. So we're still working through the process to get that much more automated and much quicker for our clients. And that's basically our number one priority as we build out our roadmap this year, is to continue to enhance our measurement because it's, it's what all our clients want.
- [15:30]
Peter V. Bond
Oh, I think Simone, from based based on what you said, you're clearly addressing the two biggest obstacles I see to wider spread CPG adoption of retail media. One is scale and I think you've clearly achieved will ask you about that in my next question. The other one is measurement that you are very. You use the term IRO as you're getting at what the brands need to make those decisions. So, so kudos to you. I'd love if you could help dimensionalize Triangle solution in terms of some of those, some of those key indicators. I'd like to understand your audience size, your transaction capture rate, you know, geographic coverage and just overall reach. Whatever you know, you think is most important, that particularly to the brand people that are listening to this podcast that you would want them to understand Triangle brings to their, to their media strategy.
- [16:30]
Simone Lumsden
Well, first of all I'll just talk about the gas that goes into the engine. So what fuels our retail media product is our loyalty program. And it is important. And you talked earlier a little bit about my remit. I do both of those and it's really important that I am the same human that runs the loyalty program that actually is gathering all of these data signals and marketing and talking to our customers to engage them in our retail products so that we can get these great data signals because then turn it around and create a media product. Some organizations, it's housed in two different areas so they've got that extra tax of having to connect together. But we and Canadian Tire have it all in one team and we have 11.4 million active customers in our loyalty program. So two thirds of the households in this country have an active account and are actively using their Triangle Rewards account with us. So we're getting over a billion data signals every single year from these customers. So those are digital signals that come across all of our channels, our own channels. So think about our website, our app, our emails, etc. So we get those interactions with those customers on an annual basis. So that's on our owned channels. So above and beyond the billion signals that we are getting and interactions that come to us naturally, we of course partner with third party, so all the usual players in that space, Meta, Google, Snap, TikTok, Pinterest, of course we are using our audiences to buy with those partners audiences and creating campaigns for our clients that are bespoke to them that are based on this very unique first party data that we have. And so what we're doing with all of our clients is we're both targeting on the outside on third party assets and then we're using our own assets and actually creating customer journeys to bring customers into our ecosystem and or managing them through our own ecosystem if they come on their own.
- [18:35]
Sree Rajagopalan
Absolutely fabulous. Wouldn't have expected any less from you. But let's get deeper and deeper from measurement into the actual retail media solution itself. So let's get into inventory, specifically core on site solutions that help brands reach your shoppers. And then I'd also love to hear if you're doing off site as well.
- [18:56]
Simone Lumsden
Yes. So let's start with the on site. So on site sponsored product ads, banner ads, email brand shops, all with a mix of contextual opportunities, targeting capabilities. Sponsored product ads are in grid flow at the bottom of the page. We have lots on email now and in app. So these are new products that we've launched this year. So email, banner, email inserts and one of the other things that we're looking at now also is targeted offers for our clients. So targeted offers that actually supplement the products. So these are all the products that we have in our suite of on site properties. And then in terms of off site, as I had mentioned, we are working with all of the off site players that you would normally work with. And so we do with them as we buy audiences with them using our first party data in order to supplement what we can give to our clients on site. So it's the combination of off site on site and our clients are using both. Right. So their campaigns are spreading across both. And of course our non endemics focus very much on the off site and endemics. They like to skew of course more on the on site. So for. Go ahead.
- [20:11]
Peter V. Bond
Oh, I'm just curious how you're going about finding endemic advertisers is easy. You have natural relationships with them. How are you going about finding the non endemic advertisers? Are they coming to you or are you searching them out through your agency partnerships and what have you?
- [20:28]
Simone Lumsden
So it's a really good, good question. We have two different funnels. One of the primary ones is agency relationships and we have had some great success in getting long term commitments with the agencies because for them it's more strategic to do it that way. We're not interested in selling campaigns quarter by quarter. We want a partnership with agencies that understand what it is that we offer and then they in turn sell them to their clients. The other, the other venue we have and the funnel that we have is relationships that we may have directly. I know a lot of senior people in marketing and marketing companies and it's very easy to actually go and have that first pitch because they understand the value of this first party data if they can't get it themselves. So all that you're looking for is a brand that is open to doing something a little bit different, wants to be more innovative. And in the US you don't even need innovative people because they understand it well. In Canada you're still looking for those people who are willing to do something a little bit different, but who deeply understand the value of first party data. And there are just so many non endemic categories that can be informed by our data. We talk about representing the jobs and joys of Canadians. So think about auto. There are some huge auto players in this country, of course, with big advertising budgets. Well, we can tell you when somebody probably is going to buy a new car. Why? Because we see the uptick in their auto service. We See the kind of service trips that they're having. So if we can start to identify the kinds of customers who might be interested, for example, in a new car. That's very interesting data, for example, for a car manufacturer.
- [22:09]
Peter V. Bond
I want to remind our audience that we have the pleasure today of speaking with Simone Lumsden. She's senior Vice president, leads Triangle Loyalty and Triangle Retail Media at Canadian Tire. So I'd like to look beyond kind of the owned and operated and a little bit further up the funnel as you're establishing these partnerships with ad tech stack capabilities and even looking in store because I think it's interesting in the U.S. trade laws have bifurcated how I guess media can be bought in a physical store versus a digital environment. Right. The merchant typically is the one selling displays and other things like that. Whereas when I go to South America or Europe, I'm seeing a lot of this all being under kind of one roof. I would love to know how you think about making sure that you have the right off site capabilities and where you're kind of going in store as a mechanism for engaging consumers on behalf of brands.
- [23:15]
Simone Lumsden
One of the things we didn't talk about relative to off site is how it does actually work with the agencies. And I don't know if this is where you were going, but one of the very important capabilities that we are having to deliver and wanting to deliver of course is two things. One is the self serve capability. So the ability for the agencies to actually have their own seat and actually deployed through us because they aren't really interested, as interested as what we're doing today. They like the output today, but we're a managed service and that's a bit cumbersome all around. And it's actually not necessarily the business that we want to be in anyway, but it was where we needed to start since of course doing self serve is more costly and more of an investment for us. So we sort of had to get some momentum before we could get there. The other thing that we are thinking about as a, well, thinking about and planning for specifically is providing insights to people, to our vendor partners that can supplement the actual media that we're providing. So when you work with an agency, you may get some insights, but again those insights can only be as good as the audience that they were able to capture for you in the first place. We have robust insights that can relate to the campaign that you planned with us, the campaign that we executed, but then insights on your business period. Because again, we have all this first party data and Especially rich of course for our endemic businesses. So our endemic businesses, there's all kinds of insights we can give them about the profile of customers who do and don't purchase their products, et cetera. So that is another piece of what we want to get to in terms of our retail media offering. And then the third piece that you asked about, and I'm glad we came back to it because I haven't said anything about it yet, only because we haven't yet launched it is our in store. So I can't start talking yet about the partners that we're going to have in terms of enabling those capabilities. But we are absolutely going to be focusing on in store. So we have 1600 locations, we are 15 minutes from all Canadians. And it was really interesting when I went to NRF this year to hear people talk about the future of media and one of the speakers said it's really unclear what the future holds in the next five years. He was talking about a five year horizon. So we have the sweet spot of both of those because the way we think about media in store is in store but also out of home around the store. We are a very, very community based organization and store, our stores in particular, and you would know this from your brother Jim, having worked there for 20 years, is we are all about community and that is what we are known for. And our stores actually don't carry the same product in every single store. We're bespoke store by store, owned and operated by the dealers. And that makes gives a very unique feel to that store because of the way that we what the assortment that we have because it's tailored to that community. We do of course have full E commerce but we are highly skewed to bricks and mortar. And so our retail media product is all about the communications and the outdoor media that we show our customers as they come to the store and then aspirationally getting closer to where some of the players in the US are but a lot of them in the in the Europe Europe are which is really engaging, appropriately positioned in store video. That's what we want to get to in all the stores.
- [26:42]
Sree Rajagopalan
Heartwarming to hear a retail media leader talk about in store so passionately and in store video so passionately. How do you actually provide, you know, for brands that are asking, hey Simone, was I successful on this campaign? What sort of measurement do you provide for them? Is it Roas, is it something else? Is it a framework? You tell them, do you guys agree on objectives, brand objectives up in advance? Is it all of the above.
- [27:06]
Simone Lumsden
So we definitely do your classic roas and then we do incremental roas. So what we do there is we create a synthetic control of like brands and then we measure the performance against that synthetic control which gives us our incremental roas or iroas. So ROAS and iroas. And then we also measure depending on the objective of the campaign, if it's conversion. So for example, we sometimes will do a campaign where there's a sign up, a desire to sign up to something. So we will measure all the way through to the conversion on that particular partner site to see how many conversions they got on the site or. And then of course, if it's our endemic brands, conversion is the ultimate measure, which is how many purchases in store. So we have all of those different ways of measuring. So our measurement is actually complex in that we want to make sure we're covering off all the various bases because different clients want to see it different ways. And we also want to be able to measure it against benchmarks because benchmarks are hugely important. So we look at the traditional and then we look at the campaign specific. That makes sense.
- [28:12]
Sree Rajagopalan
We hear a lot about the hottest metric being new to brand. Have brands up in Canada started hitting you up with a report back to me and you to brand? Or is that what really I RO AS is?
- [28:25]
Simone Lumsden
Well, new to brand would be like a. So it's not what IROAS is because IROAS is basically it's just what's incremental over the synthetic control. So incremental could come from new to brand or not new to brand. Right. It's just incremental activity, incremental purchases that you got that you wouldn't have otherwise had. So we can certainly measure new to brand within our ecosystem, but we wouldn't know, for example, new to brand holistically, because we don't have that data unless we're the exclusive retailer. We can do that for our own brands. Sure, we can do that for our own brands.
- [29:02]
Peter V. Bond
Yeah, no, that's fine. I think from our perspective, you know, as and new to brand is, is, is measured. To your point, you don't have the omnichannel view. You can only say new to brand within your, your particular, you know, your particular area of retail. But it's also about, you know, how far back do you look? Right. New to brand for a fast moving consumer good is fundamentally different than new to brand for like a consumer electronic because you need a much longer look back window for those kinds of things. But let's switch now from retail media to the other part of your responsibility, which is, which is Triangle Loyalty. What's available to CPG brands who want to kind of take a look at how consumers are, are shopping at Canadian Tire. And ultimately, how does triangle loyalty help them be better at retail media through, through Triangle Retail Media?
- [30:09]
Simone Lumsden
Yeah, that's a good question. So I think for, for the prospective vendor partners that we have, it's really about understanding this breadth and depth of data that I talked about. So if you think about 2,500 different traits that we have, the jobs and joys of Canadians, all the different things that people do through the stages of all their life stages, any brand out there that is trying to understand at a more granular level, consumers, patterns, habits, practices, etc. That's where the insights of the service becomes really valuable because they can understand at a very granular level the kinds of profiles of customers that might be interested in their product and the other attributes that those kinds of customers have. And that's what is so fascinating, is just being able to interrogate the data to understand this many Canadians, and we're talking about 11 million Canadians, like it's a huge data set. And then to supplement our insights as a service which is based on analytics, we have a live panel of 400,000 customers that we can talk to at any point. We could do it at a qualitative basis, on a quantitative basis, and we could do it on a dime because these are customers who have engaged with us, committed with us. They're on a panel, we rotate them. It's all statistically sound and we don't get the same people over. We, we always rotate them out for after a period of time and they give us feedback on all of our particular programs, but also can give feedback on any of the brands that, that, that would be interested in understanding a little bit more about. I always talk about the why behind the what. So the analytics gives you the what, but it's the why behind the what. Why would you not buy this, why would you be interested in this, why is this price point good, not good, etc. Etc. So that's what's really, really interesting. And I'm actually most excited about as we get through and we evolve our retail media product, like the bare bones of the retail media product, to see the partners that we're going to get who are interested in just the insights piece because it's really rich and fascinating and it's something that is, I think, on a Canadian scale, absolutely unique.
- [32:25]
Sree Rajagopalan
No Doubt about that whatsoever that it is would indeed be unique at the Canadian scale. So let's jump to future trends. You know, things to watch out for, things of that nature up in Canada. What intrigues you the most about near term in the retail media industry as well as loyalty of course, which is a very important component of what you do. Are there specific trends? You know, people usually tell us AI, we'd love to pick your brand. Are there specific trends you're following, investing in? Is it technology? Is it something else?
- [32:55]
Peter V. Bond
Sure.
- [32:55]
Simone Lumsden
Well, we'll, we'll do the AI one last because AI is basically foundational to everything we do today. All our predictive models, everything is run from an AI perspective. So. And we've been using it for ages and as I talked about, I've been using it for ages at Telco as well. If we could do a little bit of a drill down on what gen can give us because that's really quite obviously fascinating. Let's talk though first about some of the trends and some of what we're really interested in. So we, in order to light up a lot of what I've talked about today is the clean room capabilities is huge. Right. So how we actually combine our data sets in a privacy compliant way, always anonymized aggregated data, but in a way that is actually going to be value add. How do we combine our data sets with other data sets in order to deliver the best value to our prospective clients? And it's which data sets do you want to combine with and on what basis and what are going to be the terms of commerce for that? That is what's really very interesting because you can't be partnering with everybody and you need to pick the right and great partners and you're doing that with the presumption of future business that's going to come. So really understanding that business is going to come and what the needs are of these vendor partners and then really going deep and assessing and understanding the data sets of others. I mean I understand mine inside and out, but I need to understand the other data sets so I can understand how I can make one plus one equal three. So and then there's the tech behind it and the security of the tech and the, the mechanics of actually building clean rooms. Like it's not quite as easy as some people make it out to see. Everyone wants to talk about standing up a clean room. It is very complicated. And so that is I would say the biggest opportunity and certainly the technology has evolved. I mean I was talking about doing clean rooms when I was in the telco space and I'll be honest, never got it done, but talked about it and tried really hard for a really long period of time. But that was quite a while ago. Now that we're here, the tech has evolved and there's a lot more clean rooms being used and leveraged by a lot more organizations. It's still complicated, but easier than it was. So that is what we think about when we look at our roadmap and we look about the sort of more complicated downstream tech opportunities. I mean, in store video is also a downstream tech opportunity, but that's a little more basic. It's this bigger, loftier one that kind of keeps us up a little bit at night in terms of how we're going to do that from an AI perspective. Automate. Automate. Automate. Automate. I mean, we just need to take the manual work out of this business. I mean, I'll be honest, we still have some Excel spreadsheets floating around. This has long, long been an extremely manual business. Humans looking at screens, humans looking at things and optimizing, clicking here, clicking there, optimizing, dialing things up and down. We are using AI as much as we could all the way through the media business. And then now that we have gen AI, there are places where we can have scripts to help us, to move us along, whether it's internally in the teams, in terms of workflow, the opportunities for workflow are monstrous. So we need to really tackle that one. And then the opportunities to really enhance our models, making them much more high performing, ingesting way more data assets, and then also just the maintenance of the data as you get it for readiness for consumption by these models. All of that is a lot easier now that the tech has evolved. We just need to apply it. But even that is way harder than me just saying it, right? So you know, you have a backlog and you need to assign people to it. Like none of this stuff is fast, but that's really what gets us excited. I mean, this business will transform itself in the next three years for sure because of what I've talked about and because what AI can enable and because of. You guys know more than anyone where it's come from. It's really come from a little bit of the dark ages, some of this, Right?
- [37:06]
Sree Rajagopalan
Wait a minute, Simone, are you saying that clean rooms, I shouldn't be bringing brooms and any bleaches and things of that nature?
- [37:14]
Simone Lumsden
Yeah, no, probably not that. No.
- [37:17]
Sree Rajagopalan
Gotcha. I did also observe that you mentioned, you know, you guys have been working with AI for a very long time in your models, and you talked about agentic AI as the next big aha moment. Did I catch that right?
- [37:28]
Simone Lumsden
Yes, for sure. I mean, that's really obviously where the application of the newer form of AI is going to exist, for sure.
- [37:37]
Sree Rajagopalan
That's so awesome to hear, Peter, because especially in modeling, as Simone describes it, scaling models for personalization, agentic AI will probably be one of the only ways to achieve it in the near term future. And to hear a retailer say they've been using it forever is actually pretty awesome. Hopefully it's also an inspiration to others wanting to follow in the journey and, you know, completely embracing AI.
- [38:02]
Peter V. Bond
Simone, thank you for joining us today and sharing your insights about how Canadian Tire is accelerating the move to performance marketing through your loyalty and retail media offerings. We really appreciate you taking time to speak with us. Thank you.
- [38:15]
Simone Lumsden
Well, I appreciated the conversation. I really enjoyed meeting both of you.
- [38:19]
Peter V. Bond
Sri, another episode from the Great White north that I thought knocked it out of the park. Simone was terrific in really showcasing what's different about Canadian Tire and how their loyalty in retail media brings some powerful tools to brands. What do you think?
- [38:36]
Sree Rajagopalan
It was fun to see you going gaga goo with a fellow Canadian who were winning the championship yesterday. I'm not sure what championship. It sounded like it was the US vs Canada Hockey Championship of some sort. Is that. Is it like the World Cup? Isn't Stanley cup the World Cup? That's what I thought.
- [38:53]
Peter V. Bond
Okay. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna indulge you. Keep going.
- [38:56]
Sree Rajagopalan
No, no. I'm genuinely interested in learning.
- [38:58]
Peter V. Bond
If you could coach me offline, I'll coach you offline. We'll get you there.
- [39:02]
Sree Rajagopalan
But you know somebody who walks in and talks about actual ownership of clean rooms and agentic AI. I'm already headed. Hello. Like, for me, this episode was going to be a lot of fun. I love, love, love that Simone told us prior to the episode. I won't be getting into a lot of technical details, but she really gave the audience things to.
- [39:23]
Peter V. Bond
She knew her. She knew her stuff. You agree she has game. There's no question about that. It was a great conversation. She knew her stuff. When she was talking about IRO as and models and agentic AI and she knew her stuff. She was quite formidable. I think she undersold us and over delivered sri.
- [39:45]
Sree Rajagopalan
Absolutely. How did you. How did you like the inventories that she kind of explained? Because they've very much evolved from being an in media company focused on within their four walls to actually totally being off site as well. I mean what was your takeaway on that one?
- [40:02]
Peter V. Bond
Yeah, I thought, I thought she understood that. Well, the lion's share of her business is done in physical store. But you know, building audiences particularly for non endemic can be really powerful for those brands because they have really rich. Something I said in the episode is true. Like the major competitor to them in Canada is going to be Walmart right now. Walmart strategic advantages. They all sell groceries so they get a lot of transactions. The challenge for Walmart is they don't have a loyalty program and they're not part of the big coalition loyalty program in Canada Air miles. Which means that the ability to tokenize transactions and associate them with a household is more challenged. So Canadian Tire has very, very rich data in categories that are not easy to measure in the other major retailers. So I think it does give them a really great advantage particularly in non grocery related categories.
- [41:01]
Sree Rajagopalan
No doubt about it, Peter. And I think the explanation about metrics and that the industry is still very much gravitating towards IROAs and ROAS. That was interesting to hear that even Canada's literally the same blueprint as the US and then a piece of that IROS is the new to media or new to brand. I'm sorry. Which was good to kind of confirm that that's the case in Canada as well. I loved all the stuff about the loyalty program and how they're focused on it and you know, obviously Canadian tires a very successful loyalty program. But it was interesting to hear the how behind it.
- [41:36]
Peter V. Bond
Yeah, the how. Yes, exactly. The why behind the what as as Simone shared with us.
- [41:43]
Sree Rajagopalan
Overall Peter, I'll tell you it was a episode filled with a lot of details on the success of Canadian Tire. Those of you up in Canada, hopefully you enjoyed listening to this episode and we'll have much to take away from.
- [41:55]
Peter V. Bond
I know one particular member of the Raja Gopalan family who will be listening with great intent to this episode. He might.
- [42:01]
Sree Rajagopalan
Yeah, we gotta tell him, don't we that she was here.
- [42:03]
Peter V. Bond
I know we do. We absolutely do. Hey to Sheree. I want to thank you for joining me as always on this journey. Another great, great episode and great to to do the recap to our audience. First and foremost, thank you to the 35000 followers on LinkedIn who trust us to both educate and entertain them. And if you can one more ask, just go to Apple, Spotify, whatever your preferred listening platform is. Leave us a rating, give us a star number. We like five. We hope you do too. And we want to thank you for joining us. We look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of the CPG Guys Podcast. Goodbye.
- [42:53]
Unknown
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